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Nath

@ Nath @aussie.zone

Posts
15
Comments
270
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Australia was once the gold standard for gun safety. Experts say it’s losing control

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  • What a beat-up. Australia is still the gold standard of gun safety.

    the number of gun licence holders per capita has gone down as Australia’s population has soared, there is now a larger number of guns in the community per capita than there was in the immediate aftermath of the crackdown.

    What a way to word it for maximum alarm. Let's break that down:

    1. Number of gun license holders per capita is lower.
    2. There are more guns in Australia today than there were at our lowest point ever.

    So far, I'm ok with all that.

    That’s because the number of guns each licence holder has is going up – gun owners now average more than four firearms for each licence.

    In WA, gun owners are now split between suburban and rural. In a rural setting like a farm, I'm comfortable that a gun owner likely needs more than four guns for assorted tasks. In suburbia, I am not comfortable with any guns in the home, but the law has come in with a maximum of five.

    In Sydney New South Wales firearm register data shows that there are more than 70 individuals who own more than 100 firearms.

    This one is difficult to defend. I don't know what the maximum number of guns to own should be, but I see no way to justify 100+ guns. Nobody needs that many. I'm also unsure how to read this sentence: Is the register in Sydney, New South Wales? Or is it saying that the individuals are in Sydney according to the New South Wales register? I would read this statement as "In Sydney, the New South Wales firearm register says there are 70 individuals..." which means the people are all over the state, but the register is in Sydney. And it also makes the sentence super-dooper misleading.

    Even accounting for all the rage-bait, the biggest difference we have is that our guns are all registered. If you find a gun in the street, Police can look up who owns it, that isn't so easy in USA.

  • Australia’s gun lobby says it’s ‘winning’ the fight against firearm control as numbers surge

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  • I'm not really sure what "winning" in this picture is. I wasn't aware there was a contest going on about this topic. I remember having a discussion with someone on this site a few months about gun control, my perspective mostly boiled down to "I don't think about guns much". I do remember being surprised that even after the laws coming into WA that it was still going to be possible to have handguns in suburbia - I thought they needed to be kept at the shooting club.

    In May a group of national shooting bodies met in the Australian capital to discuss how best to respond to what they describe as a “growing attack” on firearm users, and the need for a unified position. The group met again in late July.

    The lobby is alarmed especially by new firearms laws introduced in Western Australia, which have – among other measures – limited the number of guns that an individual licence holder can own.

    If five guns isn't enough for you in suburbia (rural people can have more), I'm not really sure you're the sort of person I want to see licensed to own firearms in the first place.

    “Politicians are going to pay attention because politicians respect numbers, and the last thing they want to do is to irritate big blocks of people.”

    Yeah - the number of firearms owners is totally dwarfed by the majority of people who are happy that guns/shootings aren't an everyday thing in Australia. You want to see a block of irritated people, start changing this fact.

  • ‘Long may she reign’: How powerful is Gina Rinehart?

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  • Conjuring a future in which Australian Defence Force vehicles, ships and planes could be stranded without fuel

    As farcical as this image is, I'd actually love to live in a world where two nations at odds with one another have to call a ceasefire because they've exhausted their emissions budgets.

  • Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem

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  • I think money is a huge part of the reason. I never even considered a teaching career because teachers don't get paid enough.

  • Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem

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  • This has been our experience since 2017. No male teachers until High School. The youngest kid has a ⅓ chance of getting the school's one male teacher in year 6 next year.

  • Recycling alone won’t limit the scourge of soft plastics in our everyday lives

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  • ReduceReuseRecycle

    Recycling has never been plan A. Avoid plastics as much as you can. Reuse them as much as possible when you do get them. Finally, recycle.

    You'd be amazed at how much you don't need to recycle when you don't get it in the first place.

  • Kate Chaney: By increasing the GST to 15%, we could make the tax system fairer for younger Australians

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  • I don't believe it. They pitched the GST to us in 1999 as "You'll receive more money in your pay packet and that will offset the 10% GST". Sounds a lot like this.I was making about $35k in 2000, and that extra money? It amounted to about $18/week. Needless to say, it did not go far at offsetting the 10% on stuff.

    From this experience, I learned that governments are like people when it comes to getting paid: Nobody ever asks for a pay cut.If they're changing tax laws, it's to end up with more money at the end. Taxes are never cut, they're shuffled around in a way to make the government more money.

  • Labor and the Coalition have very different ideas about ties to the United States

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  • In truth, you brought me here. I usually avoid politics.

    But if you turn up in an Australian instance and have nothing but vague "look at that" to go with, don't be surprised if Aussies respond with snark.

  • Films and video games have age classifications. Should books?

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  • And I do inform myself on a case by case basis. My starting point is the classification of the media (I automatically permit all games/shows/movies that are PG without the kid needing to come to me for consent). The movie Robocop is a great example here. That movie is about a cool cyborg blowing away bad guys, it's not that bad in your memory having seen it decades ago. You notice that it has an R rating, and you think harder about why that might be. Then you remember the early scene of the human cop's death and go 'Yeah fair enough'.

    Now, I can reach this same point by re-watching the movie. But that takes a couple of hours. And the kid is asking about watching the movie now.

    But that's all classification. I see no issue with classification. I'm not really sure why you do other than there are policies that lead to censorship based on classification. If we're talking about censorship, we're talking about things that are illegal. I don't want to go all straw-man, but there are things that we pretty-much all agree are not ok (eg child exploitation/abuse, Rape/snuff, revenge porn). Removing all censorship makes everything legal. I don't think you're wanting that any more than I do. But if we agree that some content needs to be illegal, then all you're arguing about is what that line is.

    But none of that was my point. My point was that classification is not the same thing as censorship.

  • Films and video games have age classifications. Should books?

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  • If there's a policy that says 'content of X classification is not allowed to be distributed to the public', then you are against that policy. That's not the same thing as classification.

    Classification is not something that mattered much to me until I had kids. But now that I do, it is vital. I personally vet individual games for the kids. For example I allow Zelda, Minecraft, Prince of Persia, Hogwarts Legacy but don't allow Witcher, Assassins Creed or Red Dead Redemption, yet.

    Do I think these games should be censored? Not at all. But, the classification informs parents whether they should be letting their 10-year-olds access that sort of material.

  • Films and video games have age classifications. Should books?

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  • I think classification is important. That said, I'm not so concerned with books. While I don't want my kids reading First Law Trilogy or Throne of Glass , that sort of content also isn't really accessible language-wise to them. In that way, books tend to self-classify themselves with the level of language found within.

    Reading between the lines of this article, I think "Emma Hussey, a digital criminologist and child safeguarding expert at the Australian Catholic University's Institute of Child Protection Studies" is probably more concerned with the normalisation of LGBTQ characters in modern fiction. She specifically said "Just because there are cartoons on the front, [it] doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be developmentally appropriate for a 12 to 17-year-old".

    Translation: 'We don't like the Heartstopper books because they're teenage love stories all about gay boys'

  • Films and video games have age classifications. Should books?

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  • Ratings and classifications are not censorship. I rather enjoyed the movie 300, but my kids aren't ready for that sort of content yet.

  • Labor and the Coalition have very different ideas about ties to the United States

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  • Perhaps "does little" would have been a better turn of phrase?I say this because mocking that sort of thing does cause people to second-guess the validity of it. Which in-turn may make that line of thinking less attractive to people heading down that path.

  • Labor and the Coalition have very different ideas about ties to the United States

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  • I'm married. So, I suppose I'm not a single person. Can single person explain what this person is on about?

  • Have men really stopped reading? We take a deeper dive into the data

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  • Ironically, your local library. If you don't already have a membership, change that.

    The ABC listen app also has some audiobooks.

  • Have men really stopped reading? We take a deeper dive into the data

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  • Ever read a Playboy magazine? Without any exaggeration or sarcasm, those articles were often really good!

  • Have men really stopped reading? We take a deeper dive into the data

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    1. Ralph Lister's Skyhold series - Really great fun
    2. Devoured all of Honor Harrington by David Weber in about 3 months. It was all I could do not to just start them again I wanted more!
    3. Kevin J Anderson's Hidden Empire series. A really interesting concept of an antagonist alien species. I liked them.
    4. Julie Kagawa's Talon books - a fun bit of Urban Fantasy about dragons that shape shift into human form and try to live among us. I'm probably not its target demographic (but I like middle school and teen books more than I'm probably meant to), but I'd read these again.
    5. Currently reading Naomi Novik's Telemere series and I'm 100% hooked. It's more dragons, but this time set in the Napolionic wars.

  • Australia, why are you still obsessed with freeways – when they’re driving us away from net zero?

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  • I don't think anyone looks at the USA and wants any of that noise. Possibly maybe the image the USA thinks it is a little (like what is portrayed in Friends). But those guys are not driving on any freeways.

    We certainly don't want anything like their car culture.

  • Researchers asked AI to show a typical Australian dad: he was white and had an iguana

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  • An 'ideal' Australian dad isn't white. He's blue, lives in Brisbane and sounds like he used to sing indy hits in the 90's.

  • '60 Minutes Australia' program propaganda for greedy Australian mining company and Trump’s Greenland takeover

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  • This post has been reported for possibly questionable source. Given that many people outside Australia won't be familiar with Green Left Weekly, I'll explain a couple of things:

    1. Green Left Weekly is absolutely biased. It is not a broad news source, rather it selects articles that covers topics it and its readers are interested in. It will interview people that will talk about issues it cares about.
    2. It often uses language that will trigger a more emotional response that a straight-talking site would avoid, they also skip providing sources sometimes.
    3. That said, it is not factually incorrect. The very website used to report it as a questionable source also concedes that Green Left Weekly has never failed a fact check.
    4. Australians generally know all this. Take the story with a grain of salt, but if the publication says a mining company is challenging for its right to dig up rare earths in Greenland in courts, you can accept it as given that a mining company is indeed doing that thing.